13. January 2014 4 min read

Give me coins Litecoin mining pool

Mining Litecoins is probably your best entry point into cryptocurrency world. Bitcoins and sha256 algorithm already has dedicated mining hardware which is few ten thousand times faster than your GPU (and even more than your CPU). As the difficulty increased the other alternative cryptocurrencies became more and more valid to mine - and also a lot more profitable (if you pay for electricity). Scrypt based coins like LiteCoin and FeatherCoin are still mined via GPU and CPU which means that they are more accessible to average user, but mining farms also eliminate most of your chances to mine for coins alone. Your best bet is to join mining pool and receive your share of block when it is found.

PPS (Pay Per Share) vs PPLNS (Pay Per Last N Shares)

There has been an extensive debate which system is better PPS Pay Per Share or PPLNS Pay Per Last N Shares. They both have advantages and disadvantages and basic difference is that in PPLNS your earnings are calculated including pool luck (so they are more realistic), while in PPS you get paid for each submitted share and can end up getting a lot less. I do not think it makes much difference if you are not a major mining player and in that aspect you might be better with PPS, but most of us are better with PPLNS as you are happy when pool is lucky and you suffer with rest when pool does not find block. PPLNS therefor increases your urge to find new blocks (although many of us do not change settings on miners to influence this). Give me coins is a PPLNS mining pool - and quite lucky one in last few months.

Give me Coins litecoin mining

At this moment you have options to mine BitCoin, LiteCoin and FeatherCoin on Give me Coins pool, but I will focus on litecoin mining. Litecoin mining requires you to add --scrypt to most mining softwares out there and if you will not add that, you will not be able to mine Litecoin (or any other scrypt based coins like FeatherCoin). This parameter tells miner that you are not mining the default sha256 coins. It might confuse a beginner, but I advise you always run your miner via script and then run script (see below for information). I am more of a Linux user where writing scripts (bash) is simple in command line but I will show you how you do it in Windows as well.

Litecoin mining script for Windows

I have wrote an article here about how you setup mining scripts for cgminer, minerd and even bfgminer. Keep in mind that most recent versions of cgminer and bfgminer do not support GPU mining, so you should stay with versions below 3.8 (3.7.3 is still OK).

Litecoin mining script for Linux

I will soon write and article about how to setup mining for cgminer, minderd and even bfgminer in Linux. Although most Linux users should do it with ease, I will still write it here in case some beginner will find it useful